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Yeah, less than two weeks ago, I attended a conference in Miami, when, inspired by recent discussions, I decided to give it a go. Motivated by initially promising looking experiments, I went straight into hacking mode for the next 10 days.

I opted for Qt because of personal preference. When I compared Qt and other frameworks such as wxwidgets like a decade ago, Qt just looked very appealing. It had layout managers

@rene said:
Yeah, less than two weeks ago, I attended a conference in Miami, when, inspired by recent discussions, I decided to give it a go. Motivated by initially promising looking experiments, I went straight into hacking mode for the next 10 days.

I opted for Qt because of personal preference. When I compared Qt and other frameworks such as wxwidgets like a decade ago, Qt just looked very appealing. It had layout managers

I also found Qt's signals and slots mechanism very good for de-coupling designs but connecting components. From an OO point of view it looked refreshingly well done and intuitive, especially compared to other frameworks that looked like a wrapper of APIs like the MFC.

wxWidgets would have been my choice #2, as every time I checked, it appeared to be very mature and not that hard to use.

Qt has a very good C++ API that can help writing cross-platform native apps without having to implement a cross-platform layer for more low level systems programming tasks, and it definitely helped when C++ didn't have easy to use containers, threads, sockets, etc.

Having said that, I hardly ever do GUI stuff, so what the bleep do I know.

Yeah, you are missing a couple of python packages, like cx_freeze, ... Please be patient. I will tackle Linux "install" very soon.

Basically, under Linux, there won't be the need for "building", it's more about getting dependencies satisfied. You would need python 3.6, and a couple of python modules, such as pyqt, qscintilla (forgot the name, will dig it up), etc. Then you can just run sublimeless_zk directly.

But just give me a day or two, I will sort this out, my initial focus is getting it out for Win and Mac. Linux is a breeze, it's the most Dev friendly environment there probably is

It is here

The Zettelkasten for the rest of us

At the moment, there are only binaries for macOS and Windows 10. Shortly, instructions will be updated for running it on Linux.

Useful?

Hope anyone finds this useful --- well, at least I do.

I am really surprised how much I like just clicking or alt+clicking on links, as opposed to ctrl+enter-ing them (as I would usually do in sublime_zk). Makes using the search results much more effective.

Finally I could run it:python3.6 sublimeless_zk-master/src/sublimeless_zk.py

@rene Really great work! I'm looking forward to toying around with it more, but at first glance it seems really great. There's much less friction as opposed to the sublime-plugin. You already mentioned how much you enjoyed not having to press ctrl-enter to follow links anymore. I think that the absence of such small obstacles makes for a really great user experience.

Finally I could run it:python3.6 sublimeless_zk-master/src/sublimeless_zk.py

@rene Really great work! I'm looking forward to toying around with it more, but at first glance it seems really great. There's much less friction as opposed to the sublime-plugin. You already mentioned how much you enjoyed not having to press ctrl-enter to follow links anymore. I think that the absence of such small obstacles makes for a really great user experience.

@rene Really great work! I'm looking forward to toying around with it more, but at first glance it seems really great. There's much less friction as opposed to the sublime-plugin. You already mentioned how much you enjoyed not having to press ctrl-enter to follow links anymore. I think that the absence of such small obstacles makes for a really great user experience.

Yeah, it's those little things....

I want to add more convenience, like a theme editor that lets you save and use your own themes (so you can at least modify font and font size ), ... but need to get the Linux install right first. It's bugging me

I decided to give Sublimeless ZK some testing (in MacOS) while researching/writing today, and it was a pretty smooth experience! (Not bad for a "too young to be even beta" release!)

Just a few issues that might be addressed, @rene, and a few shortcuts that might make Sublimeless as useful as Sublime has been:

I have set "double_brackets": true, but anything in single brackets automatically operates as a link. This seems to be a problem especially since single clicks automatically open links. Any time I click on something in single brackets (the page numbers preceding a mmd-citekey citation, for example) a new note is created. I created a lot of new notes with page numbers for titles today...

The keystroke opt-delete functions as undo, rather than deleting a single word at a time, as it does elsewhere on my machine (including in Sublime ZK). Similarly, cmd-delete deletes a single word at a time, instead of deleting an entirely line as expected. (On the other hand, opt-arrow, cmd-arrow, opt-shift-arrow and cmd-shift-arrow function as expected.)

The "insert section number" function includes the note title as a section heading. (The "insert heading number" function in Sublime ZK does not include the note title as a section heading.)

It would be nice to have some similar shortcuts as in Sublime ZK, such as:

cmd-w to close the current note

opt-shift-bracket to switch between open notes

cmd-p to fuzzy search for an individual note by title (I use this shortcut a lot in Sublime ZK to get to my top-level overview notes.)

I'll keep playing around with it and see what else I come across. Nice work so far!

@argonsnorts said:
I decided to give Sublimeless ZK some testing (in MacOS) while researching/writing today, and it was a pretty smooth experience! (Not bad for a "too young to be even beta" release!)

Just a few issues that might be addressed, @rene, and a few shortcuts that might make Sublimeless as useful as Sublime has been:

I have set "double_brackets": true, but anything in single brackets automatically operates as a link. This seems to be a problem especially since single clicks automatically open links. Any time I click on something in single brackets (the page numbers preceding a mmd-citekey citation, for example) a new note is created. I created a lot of new notes with page numbers for titles today...

The keystroke opt-delete functions as undo, rather than deleting a single word at a time, as it does elsewhere on my machine (including in Sublime ZK). Similarly, cmd-delete deletes a single word at a time, instead of deleting an entirely line as expected. (On the other hand, opt-arrow, cmd-arrow, opt-shift-arrow and cmd-shift-arrow function as expected.)

The "insert section number" function includes the note title as a section heading. (The "insert heading number" function in Sublime ZK does not include the note title as a section heading.)

It would be nice to have some similar shortcuts as in Sublime ZK, such as:

cmd-w to close the current note

opt-shift-bracket to switch between open notes

cmd-p to fuzzy search for an individual note by title (I use this shortcut a lot in Sublime ZK to get to my top-level overview notes.)

I'll keep playing around with it and see what else I come across. Nice work so far!

That is both awesome news and awesome feedback !!!!!!

I have just committed a fix for 1. You will have to wait a couple of hours before I produce version 0.3, as there's more to fix :-)

as for 3., I suspect what you describe is actually a bug in the syntax of Sublime_ZK that I introduced for syntax-coloring YAML headers: A # heading in the 1st line does not get recognized. If you insert an empty line before your first line, you will see the section numbering of your note title.

So to not break with the common expectation that all headings get numbered (would be odd if you didn't know and for instance use a YAML header for your notes and therefore would likely want the 1st heading to be included in the numbering), I will introduce a setting for that: `"ignore_first_heading_in_numbering: false", or something like that.

This will also go into 0.3

As for the Mac key combinations: I will have to play around with that.

sublimeless_zk-pre-0.4 released

Merged in Semantic_ZK

Unfortunately, on Linux, there is no HTML preview but an "open in browser" button instead. This is because of the way the executable is sandboxed, it just turned out too much of a hassle. On top of that, my nuoveau graphics driver choked on the web view, causing it to crash very often.

Again, on Linux, if you want to run the sources directly, please note the additional dependencies, as described here.

I have also updated the README with missing sections on the new commands, shortcuts, theme editor, HTML export, etc --- and finally replaced the SublimeText screenshots with sublimeless ones

Issues in "Insert Citation" panel (incidentally, the second and third issues also occur in SublimeZK)

if you use the mouse to select a citation from the list, the "return" key does nothing. In that case, only double clicking inserts the citation. (The "return" key only works if the cursor is left in the input field.)

books with editors but no authors are listed by year only, with no name beside it (see screenshot below)

also, strange behavior in names with "ü" (in the same screenshot, this occurs Glück and Brückner)

Tabs are inserted as spaces by default; option to insert tabs instead?

Wrapped lines indent past original indent; option to align?

3.1 Option to turn off line-wrap arrows?

After an indented paragraph, the return key creates a line indented to the level of the paragraph above it.

You might note in the README that it is possible to "put away" the "search results" and "saved searches" side panel by dragging them closed. (I rarely use them, so it's a bit cluttered leaving them open all the time, and it's not readily apparent that they can be made to disappear.)

5.1 When the side panes are closed, the main window expands to fill the space, but it cannot be reduced back to its original size (or at all).

A few issues that cropped up for me in pre-0.3 (MacOS):
[... long list ]

>

Wow, this is great feedback! I take it, I better make all this stuff configurable (and maybe toggle-able in some menu): tabs/spaces, wrap-indent, auto-indent, line-wrap-markers, ...

As for citations: I will put extra logic in there. I am specifically searching for authors. If none are found, none are displayed . But taking editors instead makes sense. I was not aware of that. And the return key issue should be easy to be fixed, too.

Aaah, the ü: I process bibtex files into something ASCII-compatible. There the dots above the ü get lost in translation into an u. I can check if going full UTF-8 will break the parser.

I can't see how you can live without the search results. I will update the README though, and make sure there is a way to bring them back (View > Show/hide side-panel?).

.4. And finally, an odd one: the program crashes if you type _** on on side of a word and **_ on the other. Try it out

ad 4. I have fixed the crash. The styling engine is very unforgiving when you want to style more characters than there are present in the text. This happened only when the _** text **_ was part of a bulleted list, or at least: inside another such style

As for _**: Currently (as of the yet unreleased 0.5) _**text**_ is interpreted as: start italic, then comes no text because what comes is: start bold, text (bold), end bold, end italic. If you want bolditalic, you should use *** or ___.

ad 3. I cannot reproduce your examples from the screen-shots. Can you isolate the text that is causing problems (replace it by sharable text) and show it to me?

This is 0.4 (see, no crash if not in bulleted list, but formatting wrong):

And this is 0.5 (example of bold inside italic, no crash, now not even in bulleted list ):

@argonsnorts said:
.5. You might note in the README that it is possible to "put away" the "search results" and "saved searches" side panel by dragging them closed. (I rarely use them, so it's a bit cluttered leaving them open all the time, and it's not readily apparent that they can be made to disappear.)

Forgot to mention: You can bring it back: go to the left side of the right margin and just pull it back; keep pulling until it is back: